What Can Computational Physics do besides Numerical Integration?

Are there many interesting computational physics problems out there? Are there any comet trajectories that will deviate from a standard ellipse? For some reason plotting the path of a baseball just doesn't spark my interest.

For some reason plotting the path of a baseball just doesn't spark my interest.

Does looking for solutions to the 3D Ising model? Or how about a percolation problem, or a vortex simulation, or a band-structure calculation, or a molecular dynamics simulation, or a heat flow calculation, or a diffusion problem, or ... ?

Did you think of maybe trying Google? Here's a few links to Computational Physics courses and books:

This 'game' actually orginated from studies on complex behaviour - a close relative to the field of chaos. Complexity is the study of the emergence of complex behaviour from simple rules and from what little I have studied of it, it is pretty fascinating stuff.

Are there many interesting computational physics problems out there? Are there any comet trajectories that will deviate from a standard ellipse? For some reason plotting the path of a baseball just doesn't spark my interest.

Well, one needs such techniques to solve any non linear differential equation or any such equation for multi particle systems. So, to study ANY physical system in a realistic manner (this means : incorporating enough variables) one requires such methods

Yes. Numerical simulation is becoming more elaborate. There is a joint program between Argonne National Lab, Purdue University and several other organizations to develop the next generation of simulators for nuclear reactors with much greater resolution. It will use a 45 group neutron transport code coupled with a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) code. It could be taken a step further with the integration of a FEM thermo-mechanical code.

Multiphysics codes are now quite common, e.g. COMSOL and FEMLAB.

dimensionless said:

Are there any comet trajectories that will deviate from a standard ellipse?